Write for us!Historical memory
Lost in Translation: The Art of the Misquote
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Few things are more confidently delivered, or more frequently wrong, than a famous quotation. We misquote for all sorts of reasons – faulty memory, wishful thinking, political convenience, or simple repetition of someone else’s error. But the misquote is rarely innocent. More often than not, the distortion tells us something interesting about the distorter. “Elementary, my dear Watson” Sherlock Holmes never said it. Not once across all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Holmes does say “elementary” in some stories, and obviously in the stories he does address Watson, but never together in that form. The phrase was cemented through stage…
Thoughts From the Woods
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I live near a beautiful park. When the weather permits, I put on my shoes and run up along a path through the trees, and turn left onto the track that winds through the recently planted Foresters’ Memorial Wood. It’s a lovely spot. The Foresters were people from Commonwealth countries who answered the call during the Second World War to cross an ocean and help Britain and the Allies in the struggle against the Nazis. Everyone did what they could We needed them. With so many able-bodied men sent away to fight there was a requirement for labour in the forests…
It’s Complicated and Superficial Knowledge Doesn’t Help
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Any serious discussion of the Israeli Palestinian conflict risks becoming incomplete when it treats the Palestinian Nakba as the only refugee tragedy born from the collapse of the British Mandate and the wars that followed. The suffering of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 was profound and historically significant. Hundreds of thousands were displaced during a brutal conflict whose consequences remain unresolved today. But modern discussion often overlooks an equally consequential human tragedy: the destruction of ancient Jewish communities across the Arab and wider Middle Eastern world. Tragedies affected both communities Between roughly 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews fled, were expelled, or were…
